Introduction

Our report aims to study the prominent trends in gun violence and malignant usage in the United States. We chose to focus on this issue as it has been a hot topic in recent years, both regarding regular citizens and police forces. By studying data surrounding the topic, we hope to uncover insights regarding gun violence. Datasets were pulled from Data-world, Kaggle, and MappingPoliceViolence. Furthermore, these datasets compiled their data from sources such as FiveThirtyEight, the Gun Violence Archive, and nationwide police departments.

Summary Info

Based on 2012-2014 data found by FiveThirtyEight and the CDC, we can find that:

Aggregate Table

Race Total Bachelors or higher Some college HS/GED Less than HS
Asian/Pacific Islander 1326 369 346 377 198
Black 23296 820 3947 10686 7572
Hispanic 9022 400 1377 3206 3897
Native American/Native Alaskan 917 40 207 392 264
White 66237 11317 15803 28266 9892
Total 100798 12946 21680 42927 21823

Aggregate Table intends to show the relationship between social staus and gun violation victims.

This aggregate table classifies victims by race and education. Both race and education represent social status of victims. Through this table, our team tries to figure out the relationship between the gun violation victims and social status.

White deaths are highest, followed by Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. Basically, there are more gun accident victims in a populous race, but the proportion of black victims is higher than Hispanics, indicating that black people has more possibility got shot from police . There are also more victims of high school graduates or people who did not like high school in all races except Asians. This means that people involved in the lower the social status (especially lower education) have more risk.

Charts

Chart 1:

Chart 1 intends to investigate the question of a lack of aggression and how it relates to the number of cases of police shootings.

A scatter plot was employed for chart 1 because there are two numeric variables being investigated. The number of people who did not express any level of aggression is being correlated to the number of police shooting cases in this chart. A scatter plot helps answer this because scatter plots work to present and reveal the correlation between two variables.

Insights: Major cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and Chicago have a relatively high number of cases corresponding to a high number of people who were not aggressive to the responding law enforcement officers. This reveals that there is potentially a common factor in major cities contributing to officer shootings in non-threatening or non-aggressive situations. For example, a lack of adequate training could be a possibility as major cities need to employ more officers since the population is more dense in major cities; this could result in less well-trained officers.Ideally, the trend would show that police shootings and a lack of aggression from the subject individual are negatively correlated; however, chart 1 presents a positive correlation. Furthermore, it appears that most cities outside the aforementioned major cities, have a relatively lower amount of cases. This suggests that there may be underlying factors associated with the major cities that contribute to higher rates of police shootings in non-aggressive situations.

Chart 2:

Chart 2 intends to investigate the relationship between states and the number of people directly affected by gun violence.

Chart 2 is a stacked bar chart. The chart presents a visual representation of the number of people killed and injured in gun involved incidents in each state from 2017. A stacked bar chart was employed because of the ease of comparison it allows for readers when comparing the consequences of gun shootings in different states. The stacked bars allow for readers to differentiate between injury and death. This is significant because often the amount of injuries is overlooked in gun incidents and the focus is drawn towards deaths; however, injuries are also impactful and should be considered in gun violence research.

Insights: Illinois stands out as the most impacted city by gun violence and shootings. This may suggest that there is an underlying factor present in Illinois that significantly contributes to gun violence. One such factor could be the presence of gang violence, as Illinois, and specifically Chicago, is notorious for its gang-related violence. In contrast, Wyoming is the least impacted city in terms of number of people killed or injured by gun violence. This could suggest that there are specific attributes of Wyoming such as effective gun regulations and laws or low population density which help limit the consequences of gun violence.

Chart 3:

Chart 3 intends to investigate the different causes or forms of fatal gun usage such as suicides or homicides.

Chart 3 is a pie chart depicting a breakdown of the different types of fatal gun usage from 2013-2018. A pie chart is useful in this case because there are multiple categories of fatal gun usage. Chart 3 allows for readers to easily observe the distribution of causes when investigating different causes of gun fatality.

Insights: The majority of firearm deaths(62.7%) suffered from 2013-2018 was a result of suicide. This suggests that perhaps the ability for mentally unhealthy individuals to access firearms is much easier than it should be. In addition, accidental fatal gun usage makes up 1.63% of the gun fatalities which suggests that current firearm training is effective in preventing accidents.